


Ire and the Marrow

by PeopleCoveredInFish



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Heist AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-03
Updated: 2014-10-03
Packaged: 2018-02-19 16:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2395112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeopleCoveredInFish/pseuds/PeopleCoveredInFish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kiyoshi Teppei is a bastard. It’s his final play, hands up in a show of friendly reassurance and surrender. You don’t see it coming, because nothing has happened.</p>
<p>Your eyes are wide open. This is how it always works.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ire and the Marrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thimble](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thimble/gifts).



Kiyoshi Teppei is a bastard. It’s his final play, hands up in a show of friendly reassurance and surrender. You don’t see it coming, because nothing has happened.

Your eyes are wide open. This is how it always works.

Professionals don’t go alone. Himuro Tatsuya baits his traps thick with honey and an enviable grace some have called supernatural. He elects to find this funny. There is something hard about the corners of his mouth, and Kiyoshi smiles for him.

They’re not romantic, what they have is too versatile, if you’re looking for a bottom line it’s as far as you’ll ever get—just married, or curious strangers, or rekindling a light that maybe should’ve stayed dead. What they have is the decoy and the real thing, they distract and disarm and they could end it there but why not celebrate?

It’s an urge that pulls them right into the center of Tokyo’s new casinos, the first line of legalization, greenlit by an ambivalent, arthritic government. They have no real desire for money. Whether plaything or conduit, money sticks to amateurs. This is a career, and they live comfortably enough on the move.

Still, when they see the marquee slicing into the city skyline, Kiyoshi drops his right hand into Himuro’s back pocket and says it’s for luck.

***

You probably think Murasakibara is just the muscle.

Good.

Most days he’s in the catwalk, piping information and theories to Hanamiya, who’s sometimes even willing to do his job and test them out on the floor. Together, they’re an ideal algorithm; clean, sharp, accurate.

Sometimes there are small gaps in the framework of their hunt, little allotments of time where they can parry physics problems and recipes for double chocolate cake. Other days, they’re both undercover, if such a word can ever be used to describe Murasakibara, who looms over the poker tables like a petulant golem, eyes tracking every card he deals through its path to perdition. Hanamiya sits across from him, soaking up chips and compliments and any suspicious behavior that might be of interest to their head of security, Momoi Satsuki.

Atsushi is working the floor the day the couple comes in.

They’re both tall—not like he is, and it’s just a fact, it doesn’t strike against him the way it once might have—and one is just broad, cheerful (a subcategory of broad), arm curved around the other to pull him close. Atsushi lets his eyes roll over to the man’s surely suffering partner and immediately makes a note to tell Hana-chin.

The man looks very suspicious.

His cheekbones were obviously sketched using a protractor; his lips match the curve of his jaw in a manner that Atsushi supposes is meant to be pleasing, and his hair sweeps forward to cover one of his eyes. When his companion addresses him directly, he smiles, and Atsushi feels that smile settle somewhere between his stomach and his pancreas, and he decides not to tell Hana-chin about this man after all.

***

There’s a cloud of whispers in Tokyo and they slip right around the man at their very center, a man who traces the lines of his casino, surreptitious, a noontime shadow. Imayoshi Shouichi has no history, no city connections, nothing but the mists from which he emerged and is continuously emerging yesterday, today, next week. Gambling is freshly legal, and Imayoshi follows the dip and swell of the market like he’s dowsing for water, attuned to its every unconscious twitch.

He recruits something like genius. Hanamiya and Murasakibara, and their shared single-digit shift between degrees of ennui; Imayoshi dedicates a fraction of his time—it’s never free, but he feels the indulgence nonetheless—to calculating the array of possibilities should either or both of his staff exert any form of extended, demonstrable effort.

Momoi, it must be said, does not factor into this analysis, as she is quite possibly engineering one of her own far-superior data deconstructions at this very moment.

***

Teppei walks into the casino that first time and feels it open around him, hundreds of millions of yen pumping through the walls, pulsing past him, sick with their relentless pace. He knows without looking that Himuro feels it too, but where’s the fun in not looking?

His eyes have barely lit upon Himuro’s flawless bone structure when someone else steals them away.

The man is playing poker at one of the high-stakes tables, neither halfway focused nor pinned to the game in concentration. A regular, then. A wan light, thin with fluorescence, flattens the table and the players and the floor into hints of red. Another player lays down a four-of-a-kind and the man’s face twitches in irritation. It’s a sharp visage, bordering on cruel, slicing in intelligence. A moment, expanding between them; Teppei leans into it, barely breathing, and the man shows his own hand.

It’s a straight flush.

The laugh that follows sings up Teppei’s spine, cello-rich and shaded with something like real delight, and he approaches the table, pulled in by recklessness and someone else’s luck. He’s met with a grin; the man is pulling chips towards him by the handful, careful to corral any strays with a flick of his ring finger. Teppei wants to do the same. He keeps his hands in his pockets and presses his thumbs against the seams.

“Hey there, big guy.”

The man leans back; tosses his head so the lock of hair hanging low on his forehead sweeps to one side. His eyes trace the contours of Teppei’s frame.

Time isn’t something you tell in a place like this, shadows crowding the edge of the game table; seven looks the same from either side of the day. Teppei slides into the seat next to him and allows his face to move into a wide smile that promises something soft, inattentive. “What are we playing for?”

The man snorts, irritation on his face warring with the rush of the challenge. “Whatever.”

It’s refreshing, not having to hold back.

***

Tatsuya isn't much for being impressed, he's structured his skin against it, but he's wrapped around someone who moves like his whole world is predetermined in pulses of light, sound slipping from its moorings at his feet.The elevator hangs somewhere between the eighth and ninth floors.

Telling the truth is the best cover, and so he lets the man suck his name off of his tongue and slip it back to him, crystallized into something small and clean; abbreviated. Tatsuya lets it settle like a cut into the newness between their skins.

"What is it?"

The words are slick with his sweat, and the man moves as if to touch his bangs, but he sweeps his thumb across Tatsuya's lip instead, says his name once more, testing, measuring.

Then, "You're going to fail."

It's not cautionary. Tatsuya allows himself a smile.

***

Hanamiya counts their transgressions like beads on an abacus, follows their patterns across constellations that only he can see. The man who beats him shores up an ocean of cheer at the base of his decency. His hands on Hanamiya's ass send him hot with disgust and something slow and sinuous that he absolutely refuses to call desire. He won't allow either of them the satisfaction.

He's aware that he is hard work.

The trap is just another part of the game, catching them, catching him, but he hasn't felt this in years, this urge to splinter and then reach through sinew and bone and touch the trembling muscle beneath.

He waits. They're here. This is how it always works.

 

 


End file.
